Unthinkable

August *** Part 2

"Audition for the Senior Class play," says Penny, reaching for the ketchup, armpit in my face. She, Siobhán and Archer are trying to cheer me up by stuffing me with Liberty Bell chicken fingers and fries.

It usually works. Just not today.

"I don't know." I'm not done wallowing. I was so ready for this volleyball season to change everything. I was going to make Varsity. It was going to be the turning point of everything for me. And just like that, it's nothing. I'm nothing. If I don't play volleyball, what am I?

Penny, Siobhán (aka Shiv) and I have grown up together, despite being in different elementary schools. Our mothers went to high school together. Right here, in the same suburban hamlet we now reside in. We've been part of the same Girl Scout Troop (#1492) and dance company car pool since the first grade in our small-town hood of Stoneham, Massachusetts.

We've always been in each other's lives, but it wasn't until the spring semester of freshman year when Penny quit cheerleading, and Shiv and I inadvertently killed the freshman girls basketball program — it turns out the point of the game is to shoot in your team's basket, not your opponent's — that we officially became a package deal.

Shiv decided organized sports weren't for her, but healing the injuries racked up by wannabe athletes was. She launched whole-heartedly into her future career in nursing, Candy Striping at New England Memorial and Melrose-Wakefield, and even volunteering at the local nursing home when she wasn't shadowing the trainers for the football and basketball teams. I guess it's probably a good thing that one of us is basically a saint.

Cheerleading had always been an interesting choice for Pen, but she's nothing if not interesting. You know that expression about marching to the beat of your own drum? Well, Penny, I'm fairly confident, has a whole percussion section. She doesn't give a fuck what other people think about her and it's that confidence that earned her a coveted spot on both Fall and Winter Cheering. It's also what drove her over the edge after two seasons with squads teeming with girls for whom cheerleading was the be-all and end-all in their lives. She hung up her pom-poms and returned to her natural habitat, on the stage.

As for me, once I recovered from the realization that I was, perhaps, not as athletically gifted as I dreamed — and, for that matter, a touch depth-perceptionally challenged (that damn basket was never as close as I thought it was), I decided that perhaps I would be a one-sport athlete. Volleyball in the fall and Drama Club for the Spring Musical. I didn't pick up track until Sophomore year. Besides, after ten years of dance classes, I always felt relaxed on stage and, weird as they were, the Drama Club kids made sense to me.

Gosh, we were so dramatic as freshman.

We didn't pick Archer up until mid-way through our first production with the Stoneham High School Drama Club. Trench coat, combat boots and a bizarre obsession with Johnny Cash — we were a little weirded out when we first met him. But as Tech Week, with its late-night rehearsals and extreme exhaustion, is wont to do, he was our savior at the lighting board one delirious night. After that, he was a permanent fixture in our group. Turns out, he's oddly well-versed on weird medical facts, has an uncanny ability to dispense the exact right therapy you need at any given time and he's not so secretly, totally openly in love with rom-coms.

"You can always come hang out with the old folks," Shiv chimes in, with a grin on her face, knowing full well there was no way in hell that was going to happen.

"I guess, I mean, I was planning on joining props crew anyways," I ponder out loud. My father has already explained, in no uncertain terms, that it's extracurriculars or morning shifts at The Gingerbread Construction Company, "At least there's no singing in 'The Crucible,'" I joke.